Last week the Senate Commerce Committee passed–with deep bi-partisan support–the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act.
The bill, co-sponsored by Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a comprehensive effort to resolve several long-standing stalemates and impending crises having to do with one of the most critical 21st century resources: radio spectrum.
The proposed legislation is impressive in scope; it offers new and in some cases novel solutions to more than half-a-dozen spectrum-related problems, including: Continue reading →
For CNET this morning, I write about the latest tempest in the AT&T/T-Mobile USA merger teapot: cellular backhaul or “special access” as its known in the industry.
Like a child sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse included backhaul in his wish list of conditions he’d like to see attached to the deal. Yesterday, Public Knowledge duly confirmed that yes, backhaul is a “multiplier” problem for the deal.
(Sprint says they would like the deal blocked, but that is mere posturing. What they really want is to use the FCC’s bloated and unprincipled merger review process to sneak in as many private concessions for themselves as they can get. And who can blame them for trying? More on that in a moment.)
For those who don’t know, backhaul is the process of moving cellular traffic (voice and data) to other high-speed networks (traditionally landline copper but now including cable, fiber, microwave and local Ethernet) to transport them to their ultimate destination. As mobile use increases, of course, the necessity of reliable, high-speed backhaul to keep overall performance up becomes more critical than ever.
There are business, technical, and legal reasons why the order stands on unsteady ground, which the article looks at in detail.
The order, by encouraging artificial competition in nationwide mobile broadband, could also undermine arguments against AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile USA.
How so? If every regional, local, or rural carrier can offer their customers access to the nationwide coverage of Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint, on terms overseen for “commercial reasonableness” by the FCC, what’s the risk of consumer harm from combining AT&T and T-Mobile’s infrastructure? Indeed, doing so would create stronger nationwide 3G and 4G networks for other carriers to use. In that sense, it’s actually pro-competitive, and a pragmatic solution to spectrum exhaustion. Continue reading →
While most folks have been obsessing over their income taxes the past few weeks, Jerry Brito and I have been obsessing about a non-tax: the universal service assessments on our phone bills.
More specifically, the Federal Communications Commission has asked for comments on its plan to gradually turn the current phone subsidy program in high-cost rural areas into a broadband subsidy program in high-cost rural areas. This opens up a big tangled can of worms. Comments are due Monday. We deal with two issues in our comment:
Definition of broadband: Thankfully, the FCC is asking for comments on its proposal to define broadband as 4 Mbps download/1 Mbps upload. This is an important decision with a big effect on the size of the program. The 4 Mbps definition more than doubles the number of households considered “unserved,” because it doesn’t count 3G wireless or slower DSL or slower satellite broadband as broadband. It also raises the cost of the subsidies by requiring more expensive forms of broadband.
The definition fails to fit the factors the 1996 Telecom Act says the FCC is supposed to consider when determining what communications services qualify for universal service subsidies. A download speed of 4 Mbps is not “essential” for online education; most online education providers say any broadband speed or even dialup is satisfactory. Nor is that speed “essential” for public safety; the biggest barrier to public safety broadband deployment is creation of an interoperable public safety network, which has nothing to do with USF subsidies. And the proposed speed is not subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of US households. The most recent FCC statistics indicate that the fastest broadband download speed subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of US households is probably 768 kbps.
Definition of performance measures: Fifteen years after passage of the legislation that authorized the high cost universal service subsidies, the FCC has proposed to measure the program’s outcomes. Actually, the FCC wants to measure intermediate outcomes like deployment, subscribership, and urban-rural rate comparability — not ultimate outcomes like expanded economic and social opportunities for people in rural areas. But it’s a start … provided that the FCC actually figures out how the subsidies have affected these intermediate outcomes, rather than just measuring trends and claiming the universal service subsidies caused any positive trends observed. We have some suggestions on how to do this.
Despite the urgency of Friday’s budget machinations, the House took time out to pass House Joint Resolution 37, which “disapproves” the FCC’s December rulemaking. If passed by the Senate and not vetoed by President Obama, HJR 37 would effectively nullify the net neutrality rules, and ensure the FCC cannot pass alternate versions of them absent new authority to do so from Congress.
Most commentators believe that the House action was merely symbolic. Passage in the Senate requires only a simple majority, but the neutrality fight has turned violently partisan since the mid-term elections and getting a few Democratic Senators on-board may be hard. More to the point, the White House last week pre-emptively threatened to veto the resolution.
In the rush of ink that flowed yesterday over AT&T’s announced merger with T-Mobile USA, I posted a long piece on CNET calling for calm, reasoned analysis of the deal by regulators, chiefly the Department of Justice and the FCC.
Since the details of the deal have yet to be fleshed out, it’s hard to say much about the specifics of how customers will be affected in the short or long term. My CNET colleague Maggie Reardon, however, does an excellent job laying out both the technical and likely regulatory issues in a piece posted today from the CTIA conference. Continue reading →
What I hoped would be a short blog post to accompany the video from Geoff Manne and my appearances this week on PBS’s “Ideas in Action with Jim Glassman” turned out to be a very long article which I’ve published over at Forbes.com.
I apologize to Geoff for taking an innocent comment he made on the broadcast completely out of context, and to everyone else who chooses to read 2,000 words I’ve written in response.
So all I’ll say here is that Geoff Manne and I taped the program in January, as part of the launch of TechFreedom and of “The Next Digital Decade.” Enjoy!
I’ve written posts today for both CNET and Forbes on legislation introduced yesterday by Senators Olympia Snowe and John Kerry that would require the FCC and NTIA to complete inventories of existing spectrum allocations. These inventories were mandated by President Obama last June (after Congress failed to pass legislation), but got lost at the FCC in the net neutrality armageddon.
Everyone believes that without relatively quick action to make more spectrum available, the mobile Internet could seize up. Given the White House’s showcasing of wireless as a leading source of new jobs, investment, and improved living conditions for all Americans, both Congress and President Obama, along with the FCC and just about everyone else, knows this is a crisis that must be avoided.
Indeed, the National Broadband Plan estimates conservatively that mobile users will need 300-500 mhz of new spectrum over the next 5-10 years. Continue reading →
Video is now available for all of the excellent programming at this year’s State of The Net 2011 conference. (Programming will also be available over time on C-SPAN’s video library.) The Conference, organized by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, featured Members of Congress, leading academics, Administration, agency, and Congressional staff and other provocateurs. Topics this year ranged from social networking, Wikileaks, COICA, copyright, privacy, security, broadband policy and, of course, the end-of-the-year vote by the FCC to approve new rules for network management by broadband providers, aka net neutrality. Continue reading →
In this final post on the FCC’s Dev. 23, 2010 Open Internet Report and Order, I’ll look briefly at the problematic legal foundation on which the FCC has built its new regulations on broadband Internet access. That discussion need only be brief largely because the extended legal analysis has already been admirably detailed by FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. His dissent (see pages 145-177 of the Report and Order) calmly and systematically dismantles the case made by the majority (See ¶¶ 115-150).
This is no theoretical discussion of statutory interpretation. Even before the rules have been published on the Federal Register, two broadband providers—Verizon and then MetroPCS—have already filed lawsuits in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the FCC’s authority to regulate. (See Jim DeLong’s definitive deciphering of Verizon’s efforts to secure exclusive jurisdiction in the D.C. Circuit) The arguments sketched out in Commissioner McDowell’s dissent are likely to mirror the complainants’ briefs in these and likely other Petitions for Review of the Order.
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Last week the Senate Commerce Committee passed–with deep bi-partisan support–the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.